


he keeps choosing you (choose him back)

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Brotherly Love, Gen, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Mycroft worrying about his brother, hints of Mycroft/Lestrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 23:03:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he was seven years old, Mycroft Holmes received a very fussy, very high maintenence present. They named him William, after grandfather, which was ridiculous. Grandfather was old and wouldn’t even be around to appreciate it and Sherlock would be stuck with his old name for the rest of his life is Mycroft didn’t intervene. </p><p>“Sherlock,” he insisted, from infancy, and it became his name. <i>Mycroft watches his brother his whole life, from an unhappy youth to an unhappy adult, and finally, as a (sometimes unhappy) man in love.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	he keeps choosing you (choose him back)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [andreanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreanna/gifts).



> I just can't seem to stop writing Mycroft and Sherlock brohood. Ever. Sorry guys.

When he was seven years old, Mycroft Holmes received a very fussy, very high maintenence present. They named him William, after grandfather, which was ridiculous. Grandfather was old and wouldn’t even be around to appreciate it and Sherlock would be stuck with his old name for the rest of his life is Mycroft didn’t intervene. 

“Sherlock,” he insisted, from infancy, and it became his name.

i.

As a small child, Sherlock had been rocked by the tidal ebb and flow of a seemingly sourceless misery.

"What's wrong, Sherlock?" Mycroft used to demand, when he was ten, eleven. "I can't fix it if I don't know what it is!"

He cried a lot. Their mother would start to keen in concert with him, offering comfort but just as overwhelmed by his meltdown. He often took Sherlock into his room to avoid the two of them tripping each other into a downward spiral.

"Everybody's hap, Sherlock," he'd insist, because his brother was a little slow and had some trouble struggling all the way to the end of some words.

"Mycroft's hap?" Sherlock asked between hiccups.

"Mycroft's hap," he confirmed.

"Mummy's hap?" Sherlock wanted to know.

Mycroft went down the list like a roll call. "Mummy's hap, and Father's hap, and the cook is hap, and Nanny Angeline has the day off, so she and Mr. Kittle are very hap."

Sherlock seemed assuaged by this for several minutes, poking his little spidery fingers into Mycroft's mouth before asking again. "Mycroft hap?" It seemed to be the most important question in Sherlock’s world.

ii.

Sherlock as a preteen had mastered the violin and then devolved from perfect concerts performed in the parlor to pulling broken notes and shrieking, grating vibrations from his practice instrument.

"Mycroft, do something about your brother," Father would say, because at that point he was the only person who could bring Sherlock to heel with a modicum of success.

Except, Mycroft didn't do anything about his brother. He simply sat, to listen, wincing at the frequencies that made his teeth feel set wrong, but otherwise not saying a word.

Sherlock was too old now to say "Not hap, Mycroft," as he did before. He had lost the words to explain to his brother that something wasn't right, never seemed to be right, even when external circumstances dictated he should feel, if not happy, than at least reasonably content.

Instead, he sent Mycroft long papers on decay and poured disconsolate sounds out of his instrument.

Mycroft couldn't ask anymore, what's wrong because he'd long since acknowledged that Sherlock didn't know, himself.

Instead, he sat at Sherlock's feet taking careful minutes of his practice. At the end, he handed him a transliteration of his performance, in tiny scored lines. He called titled it Sherlock's Sonata.  "It plays like a tragedy," Mycroft said.

And Sherlock, twelve years old said, "It was inside of my hands."

iii. 

By the time Mycroft was thirty, he had come to enjoy a level of respect in his workforce, valued for him mind and his ability to integrate seemingly endless and unrelated information in a cohesive whole that looked a bit like clairvoyance and a lot like immediate results in murky political and social waters, both domestic and abroad.

But Mycroft could have the whole of England at his feet and all the king's horses couldn't keep his little brother from the path of self destruction he didn't so much wander down as he did ran, full tilt.

"Oh, Sherlock," Mycroft said, when his mother had said all she wanted and summoned him from the waiting room to take the visitor's vacancy. "This is not what I had in mind."

Sherlock looked blank. "You said to find something to keep me occupied."

"I thought you would play with the millennial problems," Mycroft frowned, "or go back to composing. Or dissect geese. You love dissections."

"It passes the time," Sherlock sighed.

"I'm going to assign you a tail."

"No," Sherlock growled, eyes focusing on him for the first time since he'd walked in.

"You haven't given me a choice," Mycroft said, and reached out to squeeze his hand. Sherlock looked out the window until he left.

iv.

He met the DI in a cafe.

By met, what Mycroft means is he stood behind him in line as the employee at the till was in turns inept, rude and painfully slow to finish the transaction. The man in front of him, out of uniform but obviously law enforcement, was in return, polite, amused and left his change in the tip jar.

Mycroft wanted to have a file pulled on him immediately, but he'd been trying to change some of his approaches to be more socially suitable. Instead, he followed him out in lieu of ordering his own coffee, falling into step with him easily. "Detective," Mycroft said, holding out a hand.

"DI, actually," the man said, amusement crinkling the corner of his eyes, and clasping his hand. "Greg Lestrade. Who're you?"

"Mycroft Holmes. I ... have something of a proposition for you."

v.

Sherlock, turns thirty just as tumultuously unhappy, interspersed with bursts of mania as he has been his entire life. Mycroft had settled into the notion that he might never be happy, and had lowered his expectations to not dead, and not incarcerated.

The twenty five year old Sherlock he had introduced Gregory Lestrade to was passionately interested in petty crime, the pettier the better, and Sherlock was thrilled by his own ability to commit and uncommit a slew of minor trespasses.

"You're like a child who's just learned to masturbate," he'd told him once, and that had hampered a bit of Sherlock's smarm.

"It takes more skill to alter bank records than to scrub at your genitals," Sherlock had sneered.

Mycroft wanted to comment in two directions to that sentence, but reined himself in. "If that's the word that comes to mind to describe the act, perhaps you are doing it wrong."

vi.

He picked up a small, unassuming man with PSTD and asked him to spy on Sherlock. He said no, most emphatically, which Mycroft had hoped for, but hadn’t dared to expect. Mike Stamford had only introduced them a day ago, but then, Stamford has a knack for these things. Mycroft had kept him in his periphery for a decade.

John Watson, though: it was clear he had an enormous untapped potential for rage beneath his calm, cracked exterior. Mycroft wanted to send him very, very far from his brother. Sherlock Holmes did not need a warrior wearing the skin of a broken man by his side.

Mycroft sent him home with Anthea, contemplating how to extricate him from Sherlock’s life.

It was tricky dealing with an adult Sherlock. It hadn’t been a simple task to bring him to heel even when he was a child, but now it was near impossible. Sherlock was like a contrary shark: if he scented any opportunity to go against Mycroft’s wishes, he would lock his jaws around it.

Mycroft put in a call to his pet DI and asked him to conduct a thorough search of Sherlock’s flat to keep them tied up for a few hours, and turned inward, stepping into his own mind to strategize.

While Mycroft was still puzzling it out, near midnight that night, Anthea flickered his light to summon him from his mind palace. She didn’t look pleased to be delivering whatever news she had. “Out with it,” he barked.

“Your brother,” she said. “And John Watson.”

Mycroft’s blood pressure skyrocketed. “Is Sherlock--”

“He’s fine. John Watson seems to have killed Jefferson Hope.”

 vii.

It was hard to be resolute in his desire to remove him, after that. John delighted in being subtly rude to Mycroft, on occasions when he found themselves in the presence of both of them. Mycroft thought it was unbearably childish, but it seemed to be carefully constructed to make Sherlock happy, so on the whole, Mycroft felt a little off balance.

Mycroft was half tempted to give Sherlock a refresher course in basic anatomy, in case he’d deemed it useless in the ten years since his ill-fated tryst with Sebastian Wilkes, but held off when John Watson set off on some sort of failed dating marathon to prove his heterosexuality.

viii.

For the most part, Sherlock appeared to have been completely clean of all Class A stimulants for over a year. Before that, between himself and Greg Lestrade, Mycroft had dialed it down from a near constant response to his ever present boredom to a casual imbibing when he’d gone too long without a case.

Now, so far as he could tell -- totally clean. He sent Sherlock to Scotland, to be sure, and went to visit 221b. He wanted a thorough sweep, so it was not a task he could delegate, although he did bring along Anthea.

He took apart Sherlock’s pantry, which was well stocked with middle class instant meals: tinned beans and cans of tuna and instant rice. He palpated Sherlock’s mattress from one end to the other, he and Anthea spent an hour going through his bookshelf for an empty book (to which he did find one, but it was filled with a dozen cufflinks without a single pair in the box) and then as he moved on to the inside of the chimney, Anthea carefully applied the dust back onto Sherlock’s bookshelf with a large, fresh brush she pulled from her handbag.

Under Sherlock’s bed, Mycroft found a box of prophylactics. Curious, Mycroft dropped to his knees to get a closer look without disturbing the finicky mess surrounding it -- The spider web certainly couldn’t be replaced with a few deft sweeps of Anthea’s cosmetic supplies. The manufacture date on the box was within a month of the eventful twenty-four hour period where his brother had both met John Watson and been saved by him.  

Careful not to move the base of the box, he wormed the top flap open to count the contents with the tip of his finger. Nineteen out of twenty, he decided with a frown. John Watson hadn’t moved out in a fit of awkwardness, as he would have had he and Sherlock engaged in a tryst that they ultimately decided not to repeat, so it hadn’t been used between the two of them, and it was even more unlikely that after years of celibacy his brother had engaged with a stranger. He’d opened one and tried it on, to be sure, if the moment ever came, Mycroft decided, feeling his heart sink in his chest with a subtle prickle.

In a decade since Sherlock had dated (and promptly chewed up and spat out) Sebastian Wilkes, Sherlock had given very little indication that he contained any desired of a sexual nature, not any pornography that didn’t have to do with the case involving the actress, years ago, no props or toys unearthed during their drug sweeps. And yet, here, a small thing. It hadn’t been forgotten, Mycroft was sure. Sherlock should have thrown them out the moment it became clear to him that nothing would come from his affection.

It seemed stupid. Hopeful. Mycroft, strangely disappointed, brushed himself off and escorted Anthea out.

ix.

Jim Moriarty set off a bomb at a public pool. They pulled John Watson from the water, his body still wrapped around an unconscious Sherlock, keeping him above the water by the scruff of his neck, and gasping himself.

In the hospital, Mycroft sat by his sleeping brother’s side, holding his hand. It was bigger than Mycroft’s own, now, but if Mycroft closed his eyes, he still imagined Sherlock as a twelve year old, thin chest straining under the pressure of its own oxygen intake.

“I… see now why you might be fond of him, but as much as you’re choosing him, Sherlock, he’s not going to choose you back. Not in the way you want.”

 x.

When Irene Adler had the royal family dangling from her finger like so much priceless jewelry, he called Sherlock in. He was part of a duo, by then, John Watson his ever faithful and slightly mundane companion. He could generally be relied on to demand Sherlock bow to social cues, and Mycroft had almost welcomed the extra stodgy appendage, just this once.

John Watson failed him spectacularly when he completely failed to be bothered by Sherlock’s nar nudity in the heart of England. In fact, he seemed rather amused.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he growled, punctuating nearly every word, “Put your trousers on.”

John Watson snickered into his own hand.

xi.

It wasn’t often that Sherlock was hungry for a thing Mycroft couldn’t acquire for him. He didn’t know how to _not act_ on his brother’s behalf, so he paid for reservations at all the inn in Dartmoor, occupying every double room they have with agents.

He sent  Lestrade to check on them, the fact that he seemed to come alive in the sun of the country just an added perk. Mycroft wasn’t prone to attachment (a quality he’d assumed he and Sherlock shared for most of his life, until John Watson came along) but he did rather enjoy Lestrade’s company, and the recent turn of events with his wife had left him looking dour for weeks.

He had Anthea bring him the footage he wanted so he could look over them himself instead of handing them over to Sherlock’s regular security. He tried to read something else into the rumpled folds of Sherlock’s dress shirt and unkempt hair, but only saw investigation and a rather sleepless night.

xii.

The world thinks Sherlock had killed himself.

John Watson thinks Sherlock has killed himself, and Mycroft spends three days ignoring his duties (there is no bereavement leave when you occupy such a minor position) to watch John on close circuit, making sure he doesn’t do the same.

After a week, Mycroft let himself into Baker Street.

“Sherlock chose you,” he said.

John Watson looked like a cave in: completely imploded on himself, full of only dust and rubble. Even his posture was a miserable curve. “No,” John said, in a quiet voice. “He chose his ego -- the Sun had one terrible write up and the met tries to take him in for questioning, and instead of sticking around to clear things up,” John choked off the end of his sentence before flexing his hand and reigning himself in. “Now’s not really a good time, Mycroft.”

“Shall I come back later?” he asked, almost mockingly formal.

John Watson’s eyes narrowed. “Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll tell you now,” Mycroft said, giving John a shark grin. He had no idea.

“I don’t know how to make it any clearer that I don’t want to hear it. I thought… near the end, that maybe we were… but I thought we’d have time. If you’d leave now, I’d appreciate it.”

“Moriarty had three snipers pointed at three of his pressure points. He chose all of you, and stepped down before any of them felt itchy trigger fingers.”

John looked devastated, and Mycroft continued. “Admittedly, making sure you were present to watch was in poor taste.”

“Poor taste,” John wheezed.

Mycroft noted that his top was more wrinkles than cardigan, and leaned in very, very close. “Sherlock chose you. Are you ready to choose him back?”

xiii.

In Singapore, when the late Sherlock Holmes and the presumed dead John Watson had been local long enough for Sherlock to pick up an identity, Mycroft hijacked the cash machine Sherlock was stopping at, alone, on his way back to their hovel, and waiting Doctor Watson. His hair was cut short and he had a healing scar from temple to his cheek, but he looked almost…

Instead of prompting him to put in his pin, the screen flashed, in very small letters: ARE YOU OKAY?

Sherlock cautiously peered over one shoulder, and then the other before spotting Mycroft’s camera. From a grainy screen in his private office, Mycroft could see his face cast into shadow as he almost smiled up at him. He couldn’t hear him, but he saw him murmur, “Everybody’s hap, My.”

Mycroft hadn’t felt so triumphant since his first promotion.

“Anthea,” he said, trying not to sound too pleased with himself. “Check Gregory Lestrade’s schedule for me. I’d like to take him for a drink.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Hang out with me on tumblr. ](katiewont.tumblr.com)


End file.
